Search Results for: reauthorization

New FTA Head

By | | News commentary, Transportation
7 Comments

President Obama continues his policy of bringing “change” to Washington by appointing Washington insiders to key posts in his administration. One such insider is Peter Rogoff, who will be the new head of the Federal Transit Administration (FTA).

As a staff member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Rogoff had a hand in writing ISTEA, TEA-21, and SAFETEA-LU, the 1991, 1998, and 2005 reauthorizations of federal transportation funding. He has also promoted high-speed rail, light rail, and bus-rapid transit systems. Naturally, the American Public Transportation Association — the nation’s transit lobby — is elated to have in Rogoff in charge of federal transit programs, as he knows all the strings to pull to get big bucks for their tiny constituency (meaning, for the most part, transit contractors, not transit riders).

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Stimulus Status Report

By | | Meltdown, News commentary, Transportation
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When Obama started talking about an $850 billion infrastructure package to stimulate the economy, state and local transportation agencies began licking their chops. The federal government currently spends only about $45 billion per year on transportation of all kinds, so $850 billion would be almost 20 years of spending.

Free money.
Flickr photo by Tracy O.

As it turns out, only about $45 billion of the stimulus package is for transportation, which will be like the feds doubling spending for one year. The stimulus bill will not build a lot of new highways or light-rail lines. But it might set some bad precedents for future federal spending.

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Long-Range Planning Is Irrational

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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Today, the Cato Institute released a new report, Roadmap to Gridlock: The Failure of Long-Range Metropolitan Transportation Planning. Based on a review of more than 75 long-range transportation plans, the review has two major findings.

First, only two of the plans reviewed bothered to follow the “Rational Planning Model” that is taught in every planning school. This model calls for the identification of goals, the development of alternative ways of meeting those goals, evaluation of those alternatives, and selection or development of a preferred alternative that best meets the goals.

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No Wimpy Transportation Bill Next Year

By | | News commentary
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Vying to become the new Don Young (he of the bridge to nowhere), House Transportation Committee chair James Oberstar promises that the next transportation reauthorization will cost $450 billion over six years. Don Young wanted to spend $350 billion in the 2005 reauthorization, but hardliners in the Bush Administration forced him to keep it to $286 billion.

“We’re not going to do a wimpy bill” like in 2005, Oberstar promised. Notably, he was not talking to transportation users, but to U.S. steel makers, and he pointedly added that, “We’re talking about a lot of steel.”

Increasing spending to $450 billion will require either about a 9-cent-per-gallon increase in the gas tax or deficit spending at a level never before contemplated in federal transportation measures. We know from previous statements that Oberstar supports at least a 5-cent increase in federal gas taxes.

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Earmarks Are Coconuts

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Antiplanner’s friends at Taxpayers for Common Sense alerted me to the latest earmark scandal, the earmark from nowhere. Apparently, the transportation bill approved by Congress in 2005 included an earmark to widen Interstate 75 in Florida.

But in the bill signed by the president, that earmark was mysteriously deleted and replaced by an earmark to add an interchange to I-75 at Coconut Road in Lee County. By an extraordinary coincidence, Representative Don Young, who chaired the House Transportation Committee, had just given a fundraising speech in Florida where he raised $40,000, much of it from developers who owned land adjacent to I-75 at Coconut Road.

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A New Vision for American Transportation

By | | Transportation
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From 1956 to about 1986, observes Alan Pisarski, federal transportation was centered around the vision and goal of building the Interstate Highway System. But once that system was created, no new vision emerged to replace it and federal transport funding lost its focus.

Alan Pisarski (right) with Frank Turner, one of the creators of the Interstate Highway System.

(Or, it might be more accurate to say, the new vision that emerged aimed at impeding transportation in an effort to get people to stop driving.)

Yet the money keeps pouring in: each penny of federal gasoline tax produces about $1.7 billion in annual revenues. With no grand vision, the result has been a politicization of transportation, with earmarks and diversions of funds to non-highway and non-transportation projects. ISTEA, TEA-21, and SAFTEA-LU have increasingly turned transportation into a porkfest.

Pisarski offered his new vision (2.7MB PowerPoint) at the Preserving the American Dream conference last week. You can also order a DVD of his presentation by emailing the American Dream Coalition.
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Block Grants for Efficient Transit

By | | Transportation
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Last month, the Congressional Research Service put out two reports on federal transit funding. These reports offer some intriguing alternatives for transit for the next round of federal transportation reauthorization, which is due in 2009.

Click on image to download.

The first report (above), issued in September, deals a little more with transit history and structure. The almost-identically titled second report (below) came out about two weeks later and deals a little more with transit finance. But the two reports overlap in many ways, including their recommendations.

Click on image to download.

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Cato Institute

The Cato Institute is a non-profit public policy research foundation that promotes the traditional American principles of limited government, individual liberty, free markets and peace. The Institute is named for Cato’s Letters, a series of libertarian pamphlets that helped lay the philosophical foundation for the American Revolution.

In 2008, the Cato Institute published the ultimate Antiplanning book, The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future. In 2010, it published the ultimate anti-transportation planning book, Gridlock: Why We’re Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It. In 2012, it published the ultimate anti-urban planning book, American Nightmare: How Government Undermines the Dream of Homeownership.

Most recently, in 2018 Cato published Romance of the Rails, which addresses urban rail transit and intercity rail from the point of view of someone who loves passenger trains but doesn’t believe other people should be forced to subsidize their hobbies. The book includes a detailed history of passenger service going back to 1825 and is supported by 60 photographs.

The Cato Institute has also published many commentaries and other articles by the Antiplanner. The more than three dozen Cato reports written by the Antiplanner include (from most recent to oldest):

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Transit Follies #1: The North Shore Connector

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation
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What better way to celebrate April Fools week than with a series of transit follies! Each day this week, the Antiplanner will describe a transit folly that is not in Portland, Denver, San Jose, or another city that I’ve harped on so much in the past. By the end of the week, I hope you will agree that transit agencies everywhere in the U.S. have been made foolish by the misincentives created by federal pork barrel.

Light-rail trains get a chuckle over how transit agencies have fooled taxpayers into supporting their ridiculously expensive rail lines.

First up is the North Shore Connector, an extension of Pittsburgh’s light-rail system. Imagine you run the Port Authority of Allegheny County, the transit agency that serves Pittsburgh, a region of about 1.5 million people. But your region’s population is declining. Pittsburgh’s population is declining. Downtown Pittsburgh is declining. Transit ridership is dropping like a stone.

So what do you do? Why, spend $435 million on a 1.2-mile extension of your light-rail line! Of course, it is so logical. Especially when most of it is other people’s money (or, as a powerful Pennsylvania state senator calls it, “OPM”).

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American Dream Coalition

The American Dream Coalition was formed in 2003 to help people protect freedom, mobility, and affordable homeownership. The Coalition held an annual conference for many years and published reports and other information useful to people who are upset with the effects of intrusive government planning on the livability of their cities and regions. The organization is now off-line but many of its documents are still available here.

Among others, the American Dream Coalition published several reports by the Antiplanner, including: